Steamboat Springs Public Safety Director Joel Rae looks through some of the many photos he took of new police stations on the Front Range. The photos will be used Tuesday at a Steamboat Springs City Council workshop as examples of what the city could put in a new police station of its own to make it more efficient.

Steamboat Springs City Council to discuss police station relocation Tuesday

Past Event

Steamboat Springs  The dozens of Steamboat Springs residents who recently toured the city's downtown police station saw firsthand what Public Safety Director Joel Rae has been saying publicly for more than a year.

The station is cramped.

It's old.

It's inefficient.

“It's a disaster!” one community member wrote in the brief survey participants were asked to fill out after the tour, which highlighted a lack of evidence storage space and security in the building. “Everyone works in close contact. No room to store evidence, files and to do their jobs ...”

Another respondent called the building “outdated, and frankly embarrassing.”

Rae and other city officials are hoping those concerns are shared by members of the Steamboat Springs City Council, who on Tuesday night will be asked to weigh in on how much of a priority the construction of a new police station is for them.

Rae, along with a group of architects who recently conducted a space-needs study for the police department, will hold a workshop with the council and start to build a new police station on paper.

Rae said the goal of the workshop will be to determine the amount of space police need in a new facility and also to gauge whether the council is committed to such a project.

City officials will be challenged to convince the council that the station, which has been passed over for several years because of limited funding, should be a budget priority.

The council agreed to weigh the expenditure against other projects that include deferred maintenance and millions of dollars’ worth of potential upgrades to its stormwater infrastructure.

On Tuesday, Rae again will tell the council why he thinks now is the time to invest in a new police headquarters.

He said the current station lacks many things, including secure holding cells, an adaquate number of interview rooms, evidence storage and a secure entrance separate from the public entrance.

“In my opinion, I think it would be some of the best money spent that we could spend in the entire city right now,” Rae said Thursday outside his office at 840 Yampa St. “It's also going to be one of the largest and most expensive projects the city has done in a long time, and with that, we need to make sure we're doing it right.”

The city's police department has operated out of the downtown building since 1982, and a space study completed in 2002 found the department needed 16,000 square feet to operate more effectively.

The downtown location has 6,600 square feet of space on the top floor, and 1,400 square feet of garage space.

It is home to about 38 employees.

Plans to build new fire and police headquarters in Steamboat came to a sudden halt in February after a proposed sale of the existing headquarters to outdoor retailers BAP, Big Agnes and Honey Stinger fell through.

Rae said Thursday that the scrapping of the sale has taken a lot of pressure off his department.

“I think it's nice this project is no longer being driven by the sale of our current building,” Rae said. “It's no longer being driven by Yampa Street redevelopment, and there's no longer any timeline or earnest money being held or anything to cloud or complicate this issue.”

Comments

I agree its time we looked into the options we have for a new Police dept, and opening a discussion this way is far better than surprising city council with a deal to sell the present station before securing a new one.

Has anyone looked into taking over the current VYEA building? I thought YVEA was already taking steps to move their garage and offices out of downtown, by acquiring land on the west side. As a Co-OP, YVEA might be easy to persuade to sell if a counter offer that benefited them was reached. Their facility seems the right size for the SSPD, and its just next door to the current PD and closer to Milk Run!

Maybe YVEA could take over the property the housing authority owns behind 7-11, and the SSPD could move next door, then Honey-Bap-Agnes would be free to purchase the old PD station.

I think a bunch of thinking is needed to figure out what is a workable plan.

Current building houses both PD and FD. Does it make more sense for one or the other to stay, or both to leave?

What are the preferable locations for each? And what is the additional cost for those locations vs inferior locations owned by the city?

What is the financing plan? The one option that should be rejected out of hand is various schemes invented to issue things like bonds, but are cleverly set up to avoid the public vote required for issuing bonds.

This are major long term decisions that is way too important to mess up with rushed decisions. City Council should expect to put it to a public vote and so should expect the need to convince the public that the decision properly considered the alternatives and is financially sound.

If the Redevelopment Authority proposed for downtown district goes thru..it can condemn any property it determines to be blighted and using Eminant domain take it and then sell it to the city... PD could be anywhere it wanted to be... with that we could all sit back and watch some real fireworks.